Sell and buy or rent out and buy?

edh_2

Hi all,

This is my first post, firstly I'd like to say what a great read this site and forums are. - They really make you think!.

The current plan we have is to sell my current house and to move to a bigger/family house with my OH, (ready for kids - as my OH is getting clucky). My current mortgage has about 4 years left on it and is about and 1/8th of the value of the house.

Anyway, we've had our house on the market for about 2 months now and although we've had lots of interest we haven't had the right one, this got me thinking about our options and I was speaking to a friend of mine who suggested that as I haven't got much of a mortgage on the current house, why don't I withdraw a reasonably amount and extend the term on it and use that as a deposit on the new house and rent it out. We would then have to get a slightly smaller house than we first thought, but we would have two properties which would be there for us / the kids in the future.

I've been giving it a fair bit of thought and am going to speak to my advisor about it, but thought I'd ask people on here first; so what do you think?

TIA

Ed

Andy_L

Conventional wisdom here is that it's a bad time to start a buy-to-let as house prices are so high that it's difficult to make money just from the rent. This means you're relying on house price inflation to make money, which is something of a gamble.

silvercar

I did a BTL to secure a house we really wanted to move to. If you haven't seen the house of your dreams I don't see that you should be in so much of a rush. Personally, if it means buying a smaller house than you would otherwise be doing I wouldn't bother.